This invaluable guide offers readers an accessible and imaginative approach to the literature of early modern Britain. Exploring the poetry, drama and prose of the period, Marion Wynne-Davies combines theory and practice, providing a helpful introduction to key theoretical concepts and close readings of individual texts by both canonical and less well-known authors. Amongst other things, Wynne-Davies discusses sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry in its political and cultural contexts, considers Renaissance drama in terms of performance space, and uses the early modern map to explain the...

This work is a volume of plays and documents, demonstrating the wide range of theatrical activity in which women were involved during the Renaissance period. It includes full-length plays, a translated fragment by Elizabeth I, a masque, and a number of historical documents. Special features introduced include: introductory material to each play; modernized spellings; extensive notes and annotations; biographical essays on each playwright and a complete bibliography.

Readings in Renaissance Women's Drama is the most complete sourcebook for the study of this growing area of inquiry. It brings together, for the first time, a collection of the key critical commentaries and historical essays - both classic and contemporary - on Renaissance women's drama. Specifically designed to provide a comprehensive overview for students, teachers and scholars, this collection combines:
* this century's key critical essays on drama by early modern women by early critics such as Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot
* specially-commissioned new essays by some of...

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This much-needed collection examines the formation of a black British canon including writers, dramatists, film-makers and artists. Contributors including John McLeod, Michael McMillan, Mike Phillips and Alison Donnell discuss the textual, political and cultural history of black British and the term 'black British' itself.

Through an exploration of key women writers of the early modern period, Marion Wynne-Davies demonstrates the ways in which female authors were both enabled and constrained by the writing traditions and influences within their families. The engagement with and participation in the construction of individual familial discourses is explained via an analysis of six Renaissance families: the Mores, Lumleys, Sidneys/Herberts, Carys and Cavendishes. While the book addresses the writings of male authors from these family groups, such as Sir Thomas More, John Donne, Philip Sidney, Lucius Cary and...

This is the first full-length study of the role of women in Arthurian literature. It covers writing from the medieval period, the Renaissance, the Victorian age and in contemporary fiction. Covering the key Arthurian texts, such as Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Malory's Morte D'arthur, Spenser's The Faerie Queene and Tennyson's Idylls, it also investigates the less well-known works by women: Lady Charlotte Guest's Mabinogion, Julia Margaret Cameron's illustration to Tennyson's works and, finally, the Arthurian women writers of the twentieth century.

This book explores the way in which the support of family groups enabled women to participate in literary production, but simultaneously closeted them within a form of writing that often encompassed genre, style, rhetoric and theme.